Pulmonary hypertension is a disease phenomenon of multifactorial etiology with high morbidity and mortality. The disease causes increased work for the right side of the heart and eventually hypertrophy and dysfunction of not only the right side of the heart, but often the left side as well. The prognosis of pulmonary hypertension historically has been poor, with median survival historically being around 2.8 years. Currently, with the advent of new pharmacologic therapies, survival has improved to 50 to 60% at 5 years. However, many patients continue to progress to worsening stages of pulmonary hypertension, and despite improvements in therapy, prognosis for the condition remains grave. Furthermore, pharmacological agents are the only currently available treatment for pulmonary hypertension, and they are extremely expensive (as much as $100,000 per year for an adult) and still not entirely efficacious.
Therefore, it is desirable to have new treatments for pulmonary hypertension. Ideally, such treatments would be minimally invasive. Also ideally, such treatments would reduce or negate the need for expensive pharmaceutical remedies and would be permanent or at least long lasting. At least some of these objectives may be met by the embodiments described below.